Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky gives a press conference on the sideline of a EU summit in Brussels, on 17 October, 2024. Photo: LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP
Russia and Ukraine have each swapped 95 prisoners of war in an agreement completed with the United Arab Emirates acting as mediator, the Russian Defence Ministry says.
The ministry, in a post on the Telegram messaging app, said the returning Russian service members were undergoing medical checks in Belarus, one of Russia's closest allies in the more than two-and-a-half-year-old war.
There was no immediate word of the exchange from Ukrainian authorities.
Ukrainian news reports said the returnees included Ukrainian journalist and rights advocate Maksym Butkevych, convicted by a Russian court of shooting at Russian forces.
The reports said they also included one of Ukraine's Azov brigade fighters who defended the port city of Mariupol for nearly three months in 2022.
A private Russian group that says it looks after the interests of prisoners of war published a list of returnees and said most of them were captured in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces staged an incursion in August.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the Kursk operation was designed to divert Russian forces from the eastern front and to increase the number of captured Russian soldiers to be used as part of an "exchange fund".
Ukrainian forces remain in Kursk, though Russia's military says its forces have clawed back some of the captured territory.
A statement from the UAE's Foreign Ministry, reported by state media, said it was the Gulf state's ninth instance of mediation in the war. It described the exchange as "a reflection of the cooperative and friendly relations between the UAE and both countries".
The last known prisoner swap - involving 103 prisoners from each side - took place in September.
The Ukrainian state body looking after the interests of prisoners of war said that was the 57th exchange conducted since Russia's February 2022 full-scale invasion.
- Reuters